More than 30 years ago, Australia’s then-Labor prime minister Paul Keating was silently captivated as Māori warriors crept out of the drizzle over West Auckland’s Hoani Waititi Marae to issue the challenge.
The potency of that May Saturday in 1993 lay less in the ceremony than the cast; the young bare-chested warrior party included muscled white bodies as it approached the Australian leader in a testimony to New Zealand’s strides toward rapprochement with Māori.
Keating had barely six months earlier delivered one of the most memorable speeches in Australian history – becoming the first Australian prime minister to publicly acknowledge to Aboriginals that Europeans were responsible for many of the difficulties they continued to face.
“We took the traditional lands and smashed the traditional way of life. We brought the diseases and the alcohol,” Keating had told the crowd in Sydney’s inner-city Redfern, once the centre of Aboriginal activism. His apology incensed the nation’s conservatives and ignited Australia’s long-running history wars over the place of the land’s first inhabitants in the nation’s story.
The Australian leader had been emboldened by the High Court of Australia’s Mabo decision, delivered ahead of his Redfern speech, that overturned the concept of Terra nullius – that Australia was a “land belonging to no one” at the time James Cook in 1770 declared Britain’s possession.
The judges found that indigenous peoples around Australia continued to hold rights to their land and waters arising from their traditional laws and customs, unless these rights had been legally extinguished.
So, when Keating addressed those at that Auckland marae, he spoke as a hopeful Australian prime minister who believed his country should begin New Zealand’s long march toward recompense for its first inhabitants; but without a treaty, Keating said, Australia’s reconciliation with its Aboriginals would have to come through the courts.
Auckland adman Sir Bob Harvey – then Mayor of Waitākere – was there and recalls that Keating later told him he deliberately used his New Zealand visit to say what was difficult at home; the Australian prime minister was wary of the political and media storm that his hopes for an Aboriginal future, referencing a treaty, might stir.
There is perhaps no concept in Australian politics that makes conservatives tremble as much as the prospect of a treaty with Aboriginals. They fear their farms, rivers and parks will be swallowed in an orgy of recompense, preceded by the uncomfortable telling of truth about plunders and massacres.
Long-serving conservative prime minister John Howard opposed a treaty on much the same grounds as he opposed giving Aboriginal people a Voice to Parliament two years ago – arguing it would aggravate racial divisions rather than heal them.
Ever since the Voice referendum was defeated in October 2023, Anthony Albanese’s Labor government has retreated on its early ambitions for Aboriginal empowerment.
It is an ebbing tide familiar to first Australians; back in 1988, Labor prime minister Bob Hawke promised a treaty with Aboriginal people. It never happened. Howard later killed off Australia’s first elected body to run Aboriginal affairs.
But in September came a breakthrough. The government of the state of Victoria unveiled its Statewide Treaty Bill. It will deliver a formal apology to Aboriginal people, a permanent truth-telling body of Aboriginal dispossession and an elected First Peoples’ Assembly to inform the Victorian government on Aboriginal affairs.
The treaty has the potential to demonstrate to the nation that reconciliation with its first inhabitants can move from rhetoric to reality – something a moved Australian prime minister saw long ago on that Auckland marae and took back home.
